Issue #200

Sept 21 2017

**Special Notice**: Folks, this is our 200TH EDITION!!. We just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for joining, sharing and being part of this community! If you'd like to make a small donation to help keep us up and running, please use the Donate button below - we would really appreciate any/all support :)

Introducing: Unity Machine Learning AgentsAs the world’s most popular creation engine, Unity is at the crossroads between machine learning and gaming. It is critical to our mission to enable machine learning researchers with the most powerful training scenarios, and for us to give back to the gaming community by enabling them to utilize the latest machine learning technologies. As the first step in this endeavor, we are excited to introduce Unity Machine Learning Agents...

A Message from this week's Sponsor:

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Data Science Articles & Videos

Predicting NFL Plays with the xgboost Decision Tree AlgorithmIn all levels of football, on-field trends are typically discerned exclusively through voluminous film study of opponent history, and decisions are made using anecdotal evidence and gut instinct. These methods in isolation are highly inefficient and prone to human error. Enter – the play predictor. This tool aims to enhance in-game NFL decision making with a tool capable of predicting the type of play the opposing team will run at high accuracy in real-time...

Kullback-Leibler Divergence Explained
In this post we're going to take a look at way of comparing two probability distributions called Kullback-Leibler Divergence (often shortened to just KL divergence). Very often in Probability and Statistics we'll replace observed data or a complex distributions with a simpler, approximating distribution. KL Divergence helps us to measure just how much information we lose when we choose an approximation....

Learning to Optimize with Reinforcement LearningYet, there is a paradox in the current paradigm: the algorithms that power machine learning are still designed manually. This raises a natural question: can we learn these algorithms instead? This could open up exciting possibilities: we could find new algorithms that perform better than manually designed algorithms, which could in turn improve learning capability...

Supporting HypothesisIn September, Stripe is supporting the development of Hypothesis, an open-source testing library for Python created by David MacIver. Hypothesis is the only project we’ve found that provides effective tooling for testing code for machine learning, a domain in which testing and correctness are notoriously difficult...

Visualizing DistributionsMany charting taxonomies include distributions, but they only present a few options. Let’s remedy that with a post on the many. We’ll use a single (completely fake) data set so we can easily compare how each chart type displays the same data...

Jobs

Glossier is looking for a Senior Data Analyst to take our data practice to the next level. You will work closely with our Head of Data to provide data-driven insights to teams across the organization in order to inform strategic decision-making. You will take a leading role in shaping our Data practices, and you will use your insights to scope projects, propose approaches, and help to drive them to completion. If you enjoy finding the signal in the noise, bringing order and structure to inefficiencies, and know the mean time and standard deviation of your commute then please apply...

Creating a Bar Chart
The very basics of how to create a bar chart or stacked bar chart with labels and an axis in Semiotic...

Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.This is a PyTorch version of fairseq, a sequence-to-sequence learning toolkit from Facebook AI Research. The original authors of this reimplementation are (in no particular order) Sergey Edunov, Myle Ott, and Sam Gross. The toolkit implements the fully convolutional model described in Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning and features multi-GPU training on a single machine as well as fast beam search generation on both CPU and GPU. We provide pre-trained models for English to French and English to German translation...